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Retelling Giselle: 5 changes David made to the production

12 June 2013

In 1999, David Bintley and Galina Samsova co-produced a new production of Giselle, one of the oldest stories in the present classical repertory. David’s focus was largely on plugging plotholes in the story, removing narrative ambiguities and making the motives of the characters more believable.

Here are some of the changes that he made, as well as how they affected the story of the ballet.

1. The Duke’s Son and the Heroine’s Mother

The central premise of the ballet is that a nobleman (Albrecht, the son of a Duke) has been concealing his identity, and visiting the local village to romance a young girl names Giselle.

“I always wondered why nobody recognised the Duke’s Son”, says David. “Why does nobody in the village spot that he’s the same bloke who lives in the castle usually painted on the back cloth hanging directly over their heads?”

David introduced new moments for Giselle’s mother, in which we see her immediate suspicions.

“There’s a power to Albrecht, a bearing, which some of the other characters also notice”, explains Marion Tait, Assistant Director. “But Giselle’s mother is the only one who recognises what it means. David has this idea that Giselle herself was possibly born out of wedlock after her mother had an affair with a nobleman. So she knows exactly what she’s seeing.”

“There’s a nice scene in this version that wasn’t in Peter [Wright]’s,” continues Marion, “where Giselle’s Mother tells her daughter the folklore of the Wilis [local ghosts who prey upon young couples – more of them later]. At one point she glances at Giselle to see if she’s buying it, and the poor girl is absolutely terrified!

“Given how fragile the poor girl is, all that additional stress probably doesn’t do her any good!”

2. Bending classical lines

David further addressed the issue of Count Albrecht’s identity by asking designer Hayden Griffin to make the forest around the village much more imposing.

“In order for the Count’s deception to work, I felt that the village would have to be extremely cut-off, almost like a lost community in the woods.”

While it was cut off, it was important to David that we still saw an entire village. Previous productions had only shown us Giselle’s mother’s house. “It never made sense to me to only feature this solitary house”, he explains. “I wanted to present a wide community, with members of all ages.”

From this we also see that the ghosts of the forest are a common superstition, with the other villagers being equally spooked by the folk stories told by Giselle’s Mother.
Hayden’s designs had further ramifications for the production, however, as David explains:

“Traditionally in classical choreography you work within a big rectangle, because that’s the shape of a stage. But then Hayden came up with this big curved set, as if the characters are rounding a corner out of a forest. It perfectly supported the idea of the isolated community, but suddenly a lot of our shapes needed changing. For example, all the diagonal lines of the corps had to be staggered in different ways. But that’s easy to do, you just look at what those moments brought to the
narrative as a whole, and then achieve that in different ways, with different shapes.”

“We always set out to make a classical ballet production. [But] the idea of maximum authenticity is not important to me, because it’s all Chinese Whispers anyway. And you get distracted by diagonal lines and steps, rather than character, and it all becomes a bit academic.”

David worked on the choreography with Russian-born Galina Samsova, a former Principal with Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet and Director of Scottish Ballet. She drew upon her many experiences dancing the title role, and the two took as their starting point Marius Petipa’s late 19th Century choreography for the piece.

“We always looked at each part objectively,” says David of their approach to Petipa’s steps, “and some parts worked and some parts didn’t. Thankfully we worked well together and it was a very friction free process.”

3. Costume designs and pigs’ bladders.

While artistically there were no problems, financial limitations required a rethink of the costumes.

Previous productions had seen the royal party dressed in ostentatious, renaissance-style costumes, but to save money David and Hayden plumped for n earlier, rural mediaeval look.

The status of the hunting party is shown through the rich colour of their fabrics, as well as the tailoring, rather than having them draped in golden cloth.

At a crucial turning point, we meet Bathilde, to whom the Duke’s son is already betrothed. Rather than mark her stature by having her arrived with scores of Royal envoys, David instead decided to have her arrive on a horse.

“At the time this saved us a great deal of money,” reveals David, “although horse hire has become more expensive over time! We have to reassess whether it gets included each time the ballet comes back.”

The inclusion of the horse raised eyebrows, but for David it was perfectly at home in the story he was telling.

“Anything that we included had to be logical, it had to fit the period in which we were setting the ballet. As long as something fit that criteria, I was happy for it to be there.

“Originally we had two boys playing football, kicking a pig’s bladder about. This was as much because we had a talent young lad dancing with us at the time – a former Dance Track kid still early on in his career - who wasn’t so keen on ballet but who I knew was mad about football. So I included it to indulge him.

“There was never any risk of it disappearing into the orchestra pit though, because, being a pig’s bladder, it was fairly irregularly shaped so didn’t really roll very far. We’ve since removed that bit anyway.”

4. Giselle’s death.

Act I ends with the dramatic revealing of Albrecht’s true identity, when his secret is exposed by another young man named Hilarion. Hilarion is also in love with Giselle, and seeks to separate her from Albrecht.

However the revelation proves too much for the young girl. Following a fit of hysterics, she collapses dead in the centre of the village square.

“There’s a great deal of ambiguity in Giselle when it comes to her death”, says David. “In some productions she stabs herself, and in some she dies of a broken heart. I made it clear that she takes her own life, as it then makes sense that she is subsequently buried in the forest. If she committed suicide, then she would not have been allowed to be buried in the graveyard.

“However I decided to have her buried in an overgrown church ruin, because I felt that her mother would want Giselle to be interred in some kind of holy ground.”

“It also allowed for some moments of sympathy for Hilarion, which I felt was important, otherwise he’s too two-dimensional.”

The forest is crucial to the story, for it is there that we encounter the Wilis, the vengeful ghosts of jilted women, who seek to recruit Giselle to their numbers...

5. The Ending

In the original story, a penitent Albrecht visits Giselle’s grave at night, whereupon he is set upon by the Wilis. Giselle protects him until the Dawn, when the ghosts vanish, and then she disappears back into the ground, leaving Albrecht alone.

However David presents the ending differently, with Giselle instead rising rather than sinking.

“I liked the idea that as Giselle had saved Albrecht, likewise his sorrow had given her a release, and that she moved on from the haunted graveyard. There’s much more of a sense of happiness at the end, and it also nicely returns the final focus to Giselle, who the ballet’s all about after all."